Rise to Fame
Three finalists competed for the role of Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU in 1999. She got it. An ER arc the year before got her into the audition room. What followed was one of the most durable leading roles in American primetime: 25+ seasons, a Golden Globe in 2005, an Emmy win in 2006. The character resonated far beyond ratings. Fan mail from actual survivors of sexual assault started arriving early, and eventually that mail changed what she thought the job was for.
In the Spotlight
Forbes named her the highest-paid actor on television in 2025, at roughly $750,000 per episode. SVU is in its 26th season with more in production. But the more consequential thing she did recently was public: in 2024, she disclosed she's a rape survivor. That disclosure reframes 20 years of running the Joyful Heart Foundation, pushing to clear the national backlog of untested rape kits, and producing the HBO documentary I Am Evidence in 2018. It wasn't celebrity philanthropy. It was personal the whole time.
Side Notes
Her mother, Jayne Mansfield, died in a car crash in 1967 when she was three. Mansfield's car hit a trailer truck outside New Orleans. She and her brothers were in the back seat, survived, and were raised by Mickey Hargitay and his third wife. Hargitay spent decades knowing her mother mainly as a cultural artifact. The HBO documentary she directed in 2025, My Mom Jayne, set out to find the private version: a violin player with a reported 160 IQ and five kids. It also revealed something she'd kept private since her twenties: Mickey Hargitay wasn't her biological father.